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The most influential brand in Canada? Microsoft.

Polling firm Ipsos Reid recently picked Canadians’ brains on who they think are the most influential brands in the country. The pollster compiled a list of 100 brands, which included the brands that spend the most on advertising in Canada every year–plus a few well-known names that don’t spend much at all, like Twitter, but that Ipsos researchers thought were influential nonetheless. Brand names could be those of corporations, like Microsoft, products, like the BlackBerry, and sometimes both (like Google and Youtube). Then Ipsos asked every one of 1,000 adult responders to rank ten out of the 100 selected brands, so that, in the end, every brand had been rated 100 times, Ipsos president of market research Steve Levy told Maclean’s.

The results? Stunning.

The most influential brand in Canada turned out to be none other than Microsoft, which beat out traditionally cooler competitors Google (which came in second) and Apple (fourth). Could it be that Canadian consumers are already well aware that Microsoft is finally coming back–or, as Businessweek put it, Steve Ballmer is no longer Mr. Monkey Boy?

It feels that a combination of being successful (in such a market-dominating way) and having the corporate brand hitched to what is normally communicated as a single political segment of the population may have certain subtle detrimental effects. Just spitballin’ though.

I for one go to Tim Horton’s mostly in the summer, because on campus where I work there’s NO WAY I’m waiting in line that long for a coffee between September and April. I don’t know how popular Timmies is, but there’s always a line at the ones near me, and that’s despite the fact that there’s seems to be one every two or three blocks.

Lord_Kitcheners_Own on January 24, 2012 at 10:30 pm

It’s a quick pit-stop and they’re everywhere….so handy, yes.

Popular…not so much.

Meh…it’s a coffee.

OriginalEmily1 on January 24, 2012 at 10:36 pm

Daily Telegraph ~ Blackberry’s Problems Began With Apple’s Success:

Just three years ago RIM’s share price was riding high at $148. The BlackBerry was making a star appearance in the US Presidential elections glued to Barack Obama’s right hand.It was even blamed for creating the “BlackBerry widow” after businessmen started paying more attention to their emails than their females.

From those heights the company’s fall has been little short of spectacular. What was once the world’s leading smartphone company now accounts for just 3% of mobile phone sales worldwide. A combination of technical issues, trademark disputes and management blunders have left the Canadian group reeling.

Victor Basta, managing director at Magister Advisors said: “RIM has always considered their “customer” to be the corporation, not the employee who works there. Having taken the misguided view that they provide a corporate-mandated device, they are rapidly losing out to competitors who are rightly obsessed with the on-screen individual user experience.”

It’s really hard to determine how seriously to take this study, from the information available on the Ipsos web site. If each respondent rated a different set of 10 brands (given that there are 17 trillion different combinations of 10 brands from a list of 100), and ranked these on six scales, there is a wide variety of different assumptions one could make in turning this heap of data into a combined ranking. None of these assumptions are given. Nor is the original list of 100 brands. We don’t know who wasn’t in the “race”.

They include the usual boilerplate about the margin of error, but since there is no “raw score” given, it’s hard to apply the margin to the results. It’s possible that all the brands were within the margin of error of each other, or that a different way of combining the rankings from the six scales could have given quite a different result.

So if the purpose of this study was to show off Ipsos’ chops in market research, I for one am not impressed.

“And the BlackBerry? Nowhere to be found in the top 10.” Is that supposed to be surprising? The poll was conducted between November 23rd to November 30th, 2011. That was just a few weeks after the massive global blackout. It’s also no secret that the BlackBerry is quickly losing popularity.

Why is this surprising? Microsoft releasing a faulty patch can cause a noticeable blip in our GDP. If that ain’t influential, I don’t know what is.

What’s surprising to me is that President’s Choice outranks Walmart. Superstore and President’s Choice happened as a direct result of Loblaws needing to compete with Walmart. Not to mention that Walmart has forced massive consolidation throughout the department store industry both in Canada and abroad.

“Superstore and President’s Choice happened as a direct result of Loblaws needing to compete with Walmart.”

Both Superstore and President’s Choice existed prior to Walmart buying the Canadian Woolco stores and moving into Canada in 1994. President’s Choice products were introduced in 1984 and were even being sold in the US by the late 1980s. Superstores started in1979, though the name has varied over time; there was one here in Brampton (I believe it operated under the SuperCentre name) when I moved here in 1991. Reintroduction of the stores into the Ontario market was in response to Walmart’s expansion into groceries.

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